


So Real Beside Me

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, Anal Fingering, Dissociation, Earth AU, Finn POV, Finntrospection, Handjobs for days, M/M, Meet-Cute, Or fairly cute anyway, Oral Sex, PTSD, Police Brutality, State violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 18:20:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11765679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn still isn't sure why he decided to take the internship in this small community library, in this city so small it's practically a town. He wanted to get out of the bigger city, maybe, missed the smells of grass and trees; maybe he wanted to see how close he could stand to be to the place that for all intents and purposes, he comes from. He hadn't expected to find anything new here.





	So Real Beside Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts), [orchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchis/gifts).



> A lot of the love in this story is love for a place. I spent six years in New York's Hudson Valley, and I miss it still. 
> 
> Some of it is love for born family, for friends, for chosen family; some is the love that we act out by lending our strength or our knowledge or our resources to strangers. Some of it is the love of words and stories, the ones that tell the truth and the ones that show us what new truths might be possible. 
> 
> And the rest of the love in this story is the love that can't save us, but can change us; can't protect us, but can strengthen us; can't be the only thing in our lives, but can help us want to live.
> 
> This is for gloss and orchis. Here's to love.

In his mind, Finn calls him the Reader.

This is maybe a weird thing to do, and not just because Finn works in a library and at least half— okay, a third—of the people he sees are there to get something to read. It's weird because it's one of the things that people in the world don't do. People in the world have names, not titles or numbers.

Finn has a name now, himself, but he's not used to it. And he doesn't know the Reader's name because the Reader never takes books out. He comes in, usually on rainy days or for their evening hours, but also sometimes at eleven in the morning, when no one else is there except desperate young parents and the elderly vets who use the place to sleep. He takes something off the shelf—he seems to favor the fiction section—and settles in at the middle table with his back to the wall. It's one reason why Finn first noticed him: most people prefer the tables by the window.

The other reason Finn noticed the Reader is that he's beautiful. Curved nose, heavy-lidded eyes and eyelashes for weeks, a face that changes from every angle. Sometimes whatever he's reading makes him set that strong jaw, sometimes he takes his lower lip between his teeth and Finn has to go to another part of the library and scrape off old labels or replace magnetic tapes until he calms down.

The small Hudson Valley city is both broke and cheap, so the library's collection is sparse and a little outdated. They have plenty of science fiction, thanks to a bookstore that went belly-up in the 'nineties and a centenarian nerd who died in the 2000s. Lots of biographies, but not too many of people who died during the last two presidencies; history, if history stopped in 1989 and only referred to white men by name; nothing from before 1800 and not much after 2010; and about a million copies of _A Million Little Pieces._ The children's room is determinedly vibrant, staffed by a bilingual literacy specialist with a blue-streaked undercut who cycles between this library and two others in smaller Catskills towns.

The Reader is on the short side. Sometimes he shows up in a suit (the same one, gray with a blue sheen) and his hair tamed into waves. Other days, he wears his jeans, grimy with ingrained wear, rolled up, and sometimes his tan lines don't line up with the lines of his shirt (on those days, Finn goes and cleans the bathroom, sometimes twice). Whatever his posture when he sits down—cantilevered back with his ankles crossed under the table or, more often, leaning forward with fingers pressing through his curls—he holds it until some internal alarm goes off and he takes his leave, or until Finn or one of the other people at the circ desk announces five minutes to close. He stands up, wincing and stretching, and goes to put his book back. It's invariably in the right place. Finn always checks, but by that time the Reader is long gone, and Finn returns to his tasks or to his second job or to the room he's subletting near the creek and the sewage treatment plant.

The summer will be over soon, and the internship with it. Finn will go back up to Albany to finish library school. He'll leave behind his sterile room with its weird pale carpet and plasticky blinds, this grim city with its recently grafted-on attempts to attract tourists and its unsetttling proximity to the place where he grew up. He wonders what the compound at Sterkill looks like now, empty of children in uniformed, numbered, masked rows and the pale, stern Wardens and Invigilators moving between them like warnings.

He's thinking about it again when the Reader comes up to the circ desk and holds out a rumpled paperback in both hands. “Can you check something for me?” he asks. “The way this ends, it seems like it's asking for a sequel, but there's nothing on the shelf. Do you not have it? Or maybe it doesn't exist?”

Fucking—okay. Librarian Mode. Catalog. Catalog. Finn half turns and jostles the mouse to wake the screen up, then sees the glittering nebula on the book's cover. “Oh,” he says. “No, it doesn't. He has a title and everything, I keep hoping he'll write it, but he hasn't yet.”

“You like Delany too, huh? What's the sequel called?”

“ _The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities,”_ Finn says promptly, and then drops the mouse in between the desk and the modular panel thing that's in front of the desk to keep patrons from getting too close. “Shit.”

He'll have to get under the desk. He looks up, and the Reader's smiling at him. “Did you wanna take that out?” Finn asks. “Because if you do I have to--”

“I think if the panels come apart I can get it from here,” the Reader says, disappearing momentarily below desk level. “I'm bummed there isn't a sequel. I love the world, worlds, universe, whatever you wanna call it, I love how _rich_ it is, how it...” Somehow Finn can tell he's gesturing with the hand that isn't trying to unlatch the panel. “...How it adds up to itself.” The panel trembles, but doesn't otherwise move. “I can't get this,” the Reader says, and his curls appear over the top again, followed by cheeks flushed from stooping and a rueful smile. “Spoke too soon. Is that what you like about it? The book?”

“I like how it starts with someone who can't imagine even wanting to be a person,” Finn says. “And then he finds a way to do it.” He also likes it that it's not the normal way, that no matter how far Rat Korga comes from what he became, he won't be able to do it the way everyone else does. He'll always need to come at it from a different angle. But that's not the kind of thought you finish for a stranger, even a stranger who looks struck and pleased by the first part of the thought. He ducks down and crawls under the desk. “Anyway,” he says, emerging with the mouse, his face hot too, “did you wanna take it out or--” Maybe now he'll get to learn the Reader's name.

“I just finished it. And I don't have a card.”

“Happy to sign you up for one,” Finn says, Librarian Mode coming to his aid after all. “All we need's a name and a current address.”

“That's the thing, I don't have one.”

“A _name?”_ Finn realizes too late the excitement that entered his voice—is this, somehow, another person like him? But that's ridiculous, and now the best he can hope for is that it'll read as incredulity.

“No,” the Reader says, and he's smiling again for some reason. “My name's Poe. I don't have a current address.”

“Oh, okay. Well, if you get one.”

Now Poe is staring at him. “That's not the reaction I usually get,” he says. “To the address thing.”

“I didn't have one for a while,” Finn says. “I do now.” Actually he has two: his decidedly temporary place here and the longer-term-temporary apartment over Dr. Kanata's garage. After leaving Sterkill, he'd stayed in a few different places, with varying degrees of precarity and safety. Along with not having a name or a social security number or a birth certificate, it had made things a little difficult, and normal people had in fact reacted oddly, which was why he was determined not to make a big thing of it for someone else.

“I won't ask you what it is,” Poe says, “but I'd like to know your name.”

 _FN-2187,_ Finn doesn't say, and says the name he chose instead.

“Good to meet you, Finn.”

“Good to meet you, Poe.” He hesitates. “If you need a place to sleep sometimes,” he says. “There's, um. There's a basement for the stacks, and books need more or less the same temperature and humidity as people.”

Poe raises one brow, which annoys Finn because he can't do it and also because it turns him on in a way that is frankly unfair. “You'd do that, huh.”

He's done it already, for a couple of the vets who don't have anyplace to go. “I can only do it on nights when I'm closing and then opening again the next day, is the only thing. I could give you my number. If you have a phone.”

Poe's expression shifts, in a way that Finn has trouble reading: “Thanks,” he says. “I do have a place to stay. Places. I wouldn't mind having your number, though. You know. In case.” He digs an old keypad phone with a cracked screen out of his jeans and hands it across the desk. “Be my guest.” It takes Finn till the last four digits to realize that he's smiling, and when he looks up Poe is smiling too. “Your phone is a piece of shit,” Finn says, handing it back.

“Oh, you think?” It's not exactly scintillating, but they're both grinning now. Poe adds, messing with the keypad, “It also accepts incoming calls,” and Finn feels his own phone twitch in his pocket. _What is this,_ he thinks, _what is happening._ He says, “Or you could just come up to the desk and ask. I'm mostly here.”

“Me too,” Poe says. “I mean, you've seen me. I don't have a whole lot else going on right now.”

Finn wants to ask what he does have going on, but he's wary of asking the kinds of questions people do ask about each other's pasts. Everyone seems so comfortable asking, and everyone but him seems so comfortable volunteering the answers. He doesn't want to paint anyone else into the corner where he often finds himself. But he wants to know this person, wants to know what he thinks of the books he sits with hour by hour, how he reacts to day-to-day frustrations and pleasures. What his mouth tastes like.

But it's closing time, and it's his job to say so. “Maybe I'll see you tomorrow,” he adds.

“Magic Eight Ball says 'Signs Point to Yes,'” Poe says, and then makes a complicated face that Finn does understand—unusually for him—as the face of someone who knows he ought to be embarrassed but isn't, though Finn isn't sure why that would embarrass anyone or what a Magic Eight Ball is. “I can put that back for you,” he offers, waving at _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ where it rests on the desk, and Poe says, “Thanks,” and smiles, his eyes crinkling up.

Maybe I'm getting better at faces, Finn thinks as he makes the rounds, quietly letting the other patrons know it's time to pack up and head out.

He walks through the thick warm August evening to the Sunrise Kitchen and eats oxtail out of a styrafoam bowl before his shift with Dennis, Miss Celeste's nephew, who's working the counter tonight. He looks to be about Finn's own age, with blond-tipped locs under his food-service bandanna, and he's friendly enough but in a bored, preoccupied way. Finn has one of those dizzy moments where he wonders what being Dennis is like for Dennis, what Dennis knows about _being_ Dennis, if he's ever been anyone else, or no one. He knows almost nothing about what _makes_ Dennis, what made him, how he makes himself.

He wonders the same about Tyler and Aham, the two AmeriCorps guys he sublets a room from, who have homes and families and lives that aren't here. They're not bad guys: when he gets back to the the apartment around one, they're playing MarioKart and wave him over, but he just waves back on his way past them to his room. He lies on his back and looks up at the white ceiling and thinks about the warmth in Poe's voice, plays the conversation again and again in his mind until the sound starts to decay. At which point he begins the nightlong process of second-guessing himself, and worrying that he misinterpreted, and questioning his ability to be a person among people at all.

When it's clear that he won't be able to sleep, he takes the Delany novel out of his backpack, where he put it after he was sure Poe had left the library. The few books he does own are in Dr. Kanata's basement with his winter clothes. He opens this one, thinking about Poe's hands on it, turning the pages; he pays special attention to picturing the vividness that Poe said he loved.

When Finn read this the first time, it was the world's end and the possibility, impossibility, of surviving it that caught him and rang through him. It still does, but now, the desire built into and around the story falls on him with all its weight: _I want to omit from thought all moments when he was not available to my sight, my tongue, my hand._

 

*

 

The next day, Poe waves before settling into his usual spot with a copy of something from the poetry section (Finn glimpses the blot of orange on the spine), but doesn't come up to the desk. The day after that, Finn switches shifts with Elaine so she can get to a doctor's appointment and he doesn't see Poe at all. The third day, all he gets is another wave. It makes him sick to his stomach. He's angry at himself for misreading Poe's friendliness, feeling cold and curdled with a loneliness that up until now he's been able to push to the side.

The fourth day, the cops show up.

They're both in uniform. One looks like Finn expects cops to look, big and beefy and reddish, and the other is maybe Dominican, her hair pulled tightly back. Finn takes a breath and settles his shoulders. His dealings with cops have so far been on the survivable end of the range of interactions it's possible for a young Black man to have with a cop, which is lucky since he learned all this late. The Soldiers of Sterkill were all colors, though the Wardens and the Invigilators were always pale, and the Supreme Leader was dead-white (though that could have been the screen, something about the color saturation). They told him he should be grateful, that out in the dying world he would have been a target and an object of contempt, but they didn't tell him why.

When he made his escape, many things surprised him. But he knows what it is to be _what_ instead of _who._ He knows how to be deferential, how to hide his face in plain sight. He's already done an impossible thing. And to the people who raised him, he's already dead. He's careful, but he's not afraid.

They walk around for a while, looking into corners and between shelves like a parody of browsing, before slowing as they pass the desk. Finn says, “Can I help you find something?”

“No thanks,” says the taller one in a strangled-sounding voice that sounds like it ought to be coming from a much smaller person. “We're looking for someone, but looks like he's not here.”

They wheel and turn and leave, and Finn hears, “Why you got the cops in here, Miss Jayda?” from the children's section, where the literacy specialist and the two volunteers are running story hour. In a way, he's not even surprised when Poe shows up—in t-shirt and jeans, not the suit—comes straight to the desk, and says, “Was anyone here looking for me?”

“A couple of city employees,” Finn says.

Poe pounds the desk and does a kind of half-turn with the momentum, making Finn jump. When he turns back he's grinning. “You said that _just_ like Archie Goodwin.”

“I don't know who that is,” Finn says. He doesn't add that even though he, Finn, isn't exactly an expert in how people react to things, the way Poe reacts is almost never what he'd expect. Poe makes a brushing-off motion with one hand. “He's a detective. Fictional. Cool guy. Rex Stout, that's the author. Not as cool as Easy Rawlins, you know him?”

“Poe,” Finn says. “Are you,” and then he stops, because that's _really_ not a question it's okay to ask a stranger—he does know that much. But Poe's face turns serious, tight. “Am I what,” he asks. “In trouble? A wanted man? A criminal element?”

“It's none of my business.”

“No, it's not,” Poe says, and Finn feels sick again. And then Poe says, “But it could be.”

“Are you _hitting_ on me? Is that a _line?”_ Finn starts laughing, mostly because he's keyed up and laughter is a place for it to go, and Poe laughs too. “I”m wounded,” he says, “really, that you think I'd—yeah, it's totally a line, when do you get done here?”

“We close for patrons at seven,” Finn says around the sudden lightness in his chest, “and I can usually be out of here by seven-thirty.”

“I'll meet you out front. Can you eat diner food? There's a place in Saugerties that'll put an onion ring on your burger, just, like, automatically, you have to ask for them _not_ to do it.”

“I can eat whatever,” Finn says. There are two patrons behind Poe now, holding their stacks of books patiently, like pilgrims. “Go read something. I'll see you later.”

Once he's closed everything down, Finn leaves through the back door and makes his way back around the building. A black pickup is parked out front, not one of the swollen overchromed monstrosities that Rey calls, with her crisp consonants, “automotive Viagra” but a much older, smaller model, matte black and a little dinged but without a speck of rust. Poe's checking the tire pressure. Finn says, “Hey,” and Poe drops the gauge.

“Hey,” he says. “Sorry, you surprised me. I was expecting you to come down the steps.” Smiling, he opens the door for Finn with a flourish before climbing in himself, and whispers to the engine to get it to turn over. The truck has manual windows and an old-fashioned stick shift, and Finn's eyes keep returning to Poe's hand, the tiny flexions, the way it curves over the gearshift knob, the hairs on the backs of his fingers.

He breathes and looks out the window, the gun shop and the boat shop and the dusty late-summer foliage going by. The light is thick and gold, starting to slant, and neither of them has said anything for a few minutes. But it doesn't feel bad, just still, expectant but in a quiet way.

They talk more while they eat, in fits and starts, mostly about books—Finn has a soft spot for old field guides, Poe knows a lot about independent comics from the past twenty years. Usually when people ask Finn if he's read or seen this or that, he has to say no and it irritates him, but Poe's so nerdy and charming, waving a french fry like a magic wand, saying, “This was practically pre-internet, people found out about this stuff by _mail,_ there's about a hundred boxes in my dad's basement of xeroxed zines that I can't tell apart unless I take them out because they all have the same stapled spines.”

So Poe has a dad, and his dad has a basement. Okay, good to know. Other things Finn's learning: Poe's polite to the woman who brings them their food. Now that he's not reading, he's constantly in motion, waving and gesturing his way through explanations or to indicate that Finn should keep talking, tapping his straw and scratching his ear. He eats with gusto, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, makes faces while he's chewing that indicate he's also listening. “How are you for money,” he says when the waitress brings their bill, “shit, I should've asked--”

“I can get it,” Finn says, since he ordered fries with this exact conversation in mind. He's been honing them for four years, the little workarounds, labor-saving devices, ways to keep things from going where he doesn't want them to go.

“I don't always do things in the right order,” Poe says, looking concerned in a way that makes Finn want to yank him across the table and kiss him. Instead he says, “I don't always know what the things are, so.”

“Oh,” Poe says. “Are we gonna talk about serious stuff now? Because it's easier to do that when you're driving. You wanna go for a drive? When do you have to be at work tomorrow?”

“Not till 8:30.” The library opens at nine. “Where could we drive to?”

Poe makes one of his more expansive gestures. “Around? Once you get across the creek, those little roads are nice at night. If you like roads. And like, crickets. And stars, except I don't even know what the sky is like tonight.”

He's nervous, Finn realizes, and tenderness grips his heart, makes it imperative that he reach over and touch Poe's hand where it's pleating the only remaining napkin. He says, “Let's go,” and Poe looks back at him, blinks those lashes. “Yeah,” he says, “let's.”

They don't kiss in the parking lot, and they don't kiss when they sit down, but the air between them and flowing over them from the open windows is full of the knowledge that they will, soon. Poe takes them over the old, high metal bridge, through a small town of bar and post office and vet's office and a few houses, and makes a left onto a road that winds upward and crosses a railroad track. “It's not the biggest deal,” he says after a while, watching the road. “I do free legal interpretation and mediation sometimes for some of the people around here who only speak Spanish. Sometimes with cops or lawyers, but also with landlords, debt collectors, stuff like that. You've probably seen me come in in the suit.” He casts a glance over at Finn, who's facing straight ahead so as not to make Poe feel lke he's staring, but catches just the tail end of the look and says quickly, “Yeah, it's a good suit.”

“I thought so! Had it altered and everything. Anyway, I don't know people's immigration status unless they tell me and and I don't care even if they do tell me, but the cops around here have an idea that they can find out about people through me. Which they can't. So we're at a whatchamacallit, an impasse. And the people they're looking for are lying low for a while, so they keep showing up where I am. It's a pain in the ass, but that's how cops are. Maybe you know that better than I do.”

“Only sort of,” Finn says. “I grew up in kind of a.” He stops. “I've explained it before,” he says. “But it's still a little hard to explain.”

“Up to you,” Poe says, and Finn's not looking him but his voice has changed, less determinedly brisk, more determinedly gentle. “You could tell me now, or later on, or never.”

“Later on,” Finn says.

“Okay, that's cool.”

“No, no, I meant—you're thinking about later on.” He can't keep the wonder of it out of his voice.

They've come into a more open part of the road again, and a building looms up on the left, one of the rotting barns that can't be fixed and that no one can afford to tear down. It has what's left of a driveway, grasses and weeds growing up through gravel. Poe turns the truck off the road, leans over, and guides Finn's face into a kiss.

Finn's mostly aware of the waves of feeling rolling through him, the taste of ketchup and salt, Poe's hand on his jaw like an anchor, the hair on his arms standing up. He doesn't actually know what his mouth is doing, but Poe seems happy about whatever it is, tasting and exploring, sighing a little. They move apart after a while, a long time, not enough, and Poe says, “I am, I have been, but we haven't even talked about now yet. Is this what you—I mean, it feels like it is—”

Finn starts the kiss this time. The truck has a bench seat, but there's the gearshift and the steering wheel and he seems to have more knees than usual and they can't get close enough for him to really get his arms around Poe, which he now wants more than he can remember wanting anything—anything positive, anything besides _away._ They kiss leaning, yearning toward each other, till Finn's back starts to hurt. “If we got out of the truck,” he suggests, “maybe we could sit a little closer.”

“I'm not sitting on the ground here,” Poe says indignantly, “haven't you heard of Lyme disease?” Finn kisses him again. “We could—mmm--we could get in the back of the truck. I think there's a sleeping bag back behind the seat.”

Also behind the seats: a guitar case, a bottle of drugstore-brand ibuprofen, a sweater of almost unparalleled rattiness, a somewhat flattened roll of toilet paper, a dog leash, and about 40 cassettes with stick-on labels that say things like “HOWLIN' LADY MIX, FOR P” and “XXXTREME SUMMER MIX ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES” and “HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE”, just legible in the truck's dome light. Finn unearths the sleeping bag. They get out, and Poe comes around to Finn's side and pushes him up against the door he just closed and kisses him for all they're worth.

Eventually Finn says, “You'll get ticks. I do know what Lyme disease is.” They used to check each other in barracks, an excuse to touch.

“I tucked my pants into my socks before I got out.”

Finn buries his face in Poe's shoulder and laughs till he almost cries.

They climb into the truck bed, Finn as best he can, Poe with a familiar grace that's visible even in the patchy moonlight. There are no streetlights, and when the moon dips behind the trees they'll be in full darkness.

Poe unzips the sleeping bag and they lie out on it together, on their sides facing each other, kissing in a more leisurely way now while the sounds of insects and other night motions fill back in around them. The air is finally cooling off, and Poe's hand is warm on Finn's cheek, and their mouths are warm together, meeting and parting and meeting again. Finn's head is buzzing, his senses unmoored. His hand slides over Poe's back, up again to the nape of his neck.

Poe rolls away and sucks in a deep breath that Finn can hear in the darkness. “I just need a second,” he says, and then, sharply, “Holy shit, look, look up.”

The sky has clouded patches and clear patches where the stars hang big and close. They're beautiful, but nothing about what Finn's seeing says _holy shit_ to him. He says, “What am I looking at?”

“Shooting star. You must've missed it. I forgot it was August! This is when the Perseids come down, the earth passes through this meteor shower and there's shooting stars for about a week.” Finn rolls over and kisses him as thoroughly as possible. “What?”

“I like that you know stuff like that.”

“Misspent youth,” Poe says, but he sounds pleased. “I was such a fucking nerd, I begged for a telescope even though I knew damn well it wasn't in our budget and it would've probably gotten broken in the truck.” He sighs. “Sorry, I'm doing things backwards again. We moved around a lot after my mom died—me and my dad—and we were pretty broke for a while.” He sounds matter-of-fact, but Finn does know what you're supposed to say about someone who died, so he says it: “I'm sorry about your mom.”

“Thanks.”

None of that felt quite right, but Finn doesn't know what to say to make it more right, so he looks up at the sky and tries to ignore the feeling, miraculously at bay for much of the evening, that he did something mysteriously wrong. “Anyway,” Poe's saying, “that's why I'm always lurking around in your library. Wherever we went, if there was a town and the town had a library, I was good.”

A tiny light streaks across one of the patches of open sky. “I saw one!”

“I saw that one too.” They turn toward each other again, almost at the same time. Finn says, “I love everything about what's happening right now.”

Poe seems to hover briefly, though he's not leaning over Finn and the truck bed is holding his weight. “Baby,” he says, and kisses Finn's throat, and Finn's head goes back, the wet warmth of Poe's lips on him like tiny concentrations of the summer air, dizzying him, swarming every sense he has. Poe _is_ leaning over him now, lying on him, pressing into him, working his tongue into and along the hollow where Finn's jaw meets his neck, and Finn sighs out all the breath in his body, is coming almost before he realizes it, a long rush, a slow subsidence.

Poe heaves up above him, leaving their hips joined and still moving together as if of their own will, his silhouette faintly marked out against what's left of the stars. “God,” he says. “Finn, you—“

“C'mere,” Finn says, when he can, “move or something,” and they shift around, the sleeping bag bunching under them, until he can get his hand on the fly of Poe's jeans and rub. Maybe he should be embarrassed for shooting so soon, but he's captivated by the noises Poe's making, the way he's nudging his hard-on toward Finn's hand. “Can I,” he says, and Poe says, “Yeah, _fuck,”_ so he sort of gropes at the zipper—he can't see, and the buttonhole is stiff—until he's got his hand around Poe's cock, lean and hot in the cool night.

There's that strange initial moment of touching a dick that's not his own, the feeling in his hand without the feedback, and then Poe fucks up into his grip and nothing else matters as much as this. Finn spends some time trying different strokes and pressures, listening for the tiny changes in Poe's breath, free hand on his still-clothed hip to hold him there. He sucks Poe's tongue deep into his mouth and feels Poe's cock leap in his grip, flooding his hand and wrist with sticky warmth.

They kiss a while longer, slowing down. Finn wipes his hand on his thigh. Why not? Eventually they settle against each other, bump faces, look up again. The sky has clouded over. “I should get you home,” Poe says. “And I should get back.”

“Yeah, okay.” Finn doesn't move. Poe levers up on an elbow, leans down to kiss Finn again. “Hey,” he says. “Let me be responsible.”

“It's not home for me either,” Finn says. “It's just back.”

“Yeah,” Poe says. “I hear that.”

Moving to get up brings Finn into fresh and clammy contact with the come in his shorts, and he shifts restlessly in the truck seat as they wend their way back through the night. Around the curves, into the hills, gray shapes and black, and then suddenly a visual clanging of yellow and orange lights and the deep hoot of a freight whistle. The crossing comes down and the train goes by, car after car, at a walking pace.

They lean into each other and kiss until the sound of the train dies away.

 

*

 

When Finn got to SUNY Albany four years ago, they assigned him an advisor, and his first thought was that he could've used one a long time ago. It was true that Dr. Kanata enormously relished giving advice, leaning across her desk to get up in his face and peer at him through her giant bottle-bottom glasses. But what he liked about her was that whenever she said something to him _about_ him, it wasn't an assumption but an observation. At Sterkill, they'd told him what he had to think. In the world at large, people seemed eager to tell him what he _must_ be thinking. As often as not, the story they were telling about him bore no resemblance to his life at all.

After the escape itself, after the hospital (the blood wasn't his, but the person who called 911 for him and stayed with him until they came didn't know that) and the interrogations and the evaluations and the testimony, the one who helped him deal with the bureaucracy of becoming a legal person at the age of 19 was a librarian—Ms. Soares, the reference librarian at the Washington Avenue library. She enrolled him in a class on how to use the internet, where his fellow students were people in their sixties who'd just ended long prison sentences or who'd been laid off and couldn't afford to retire—people from whom he learned immeasurably about the world he'd entered. Ms. Soares also helped him fill out the common app for SUNY, and the FAFSA, and she was the major reason he wrote down “library science” in the spot on the form that asked about applicant interests. At that point in his life, he hadn't even held all that many books.

And it was Dr. Kanata who helped him shape his proposal to do undergraduate courses and graduate courses concurrently, and suggested he look into the archival track. “Records,” she said, hitting the first syllable hard. “Memory. The memory of institutions, yes, but also the memory of what they would rather ignore.” When she found out he'd been evicted and was staying at the shelter, she offered him the apartment over her garage rent free and stared at him over the tops of her glasses until he accepted. She'd even offered him a summer job, paid, to help her with a recently unearthed hoard of slave ship manifests and account books, used as insulation in the walls of a house.

Finn still isn't sure why he turned her down. He wanted to get out of the city, maybe, missed the smells of grass and trees; maybe he wanted to see how close he could stand to be to the place that for all intents and purposes, he comes from. He hadn't expected to find anything new here.

Now when he sees Poe in the library, Finn looks as long as he wants. Poe's working his way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and his eyebrow gestures alone are worth hours of study. On the nights when Finn doesn't have to work at the restaurant and Poe isn't interpreting for anybody or sacked out from a day of work, they take the truck out on the back roads, and between making out they talk about heteronormativity (which Finn was glad to find there was a word for) and unappealingly written sex, and the “reverent economy”, and the set pieces that seem forced and the ones that pack a punch, and the science parts of science fiction, and what makes people want to read. He tells Poe about the library's little comics section, read to pieces, and the program Jayda puts together where elderly people and small children read to each other. Doesn't say how at that age he was memorizing First Order precepts and learning firearm safety and maintenance.

“Is this what you wanna do?” Poe asks at one point. “Be the kind of librarian you are now? You can tell me the answer is none of my business.”

“No. I like this okay, and it's what a lot of people expect me to do. A Black guy in library school. But no, I want to be an archivist.”

“That's _cool,”_ Poe says. “That's documents, right? Primary sources? Letters, diaries?”

“Letters, diaries, ephemera, marginalia...”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Business ledgers.” Poe kisses him. “Shipping manifests.” Poe kisses him again. “There's a lot of preservation stuff I have to learn about, this coming year, and stuff about dating documents.”

He sort of expects Poe to pick up on the “dating” thing, but Poe's distracted by the only thing he loves more than a bad pun: “Oh hey, have you read _The Name of the Rose?_ It's totally stupid in an incredibly smart way, or at least, like, erudite. And there's a lot about archives and preservation in it. And messy medieval monks and a lot of Latin nerd jokes, if you like that kind of thing. You kind of have to make a command decision to ignore the homophobia, though.”

“You're not really selling it,” Finn says, and kisses his neck.

Poe is sleeping on his friend Snap's couch these days, and Finn is reluctant to bring him to the apartment—he's pretty sure Aham and Tyler would be cool, but not _completely_ sure, and none of them have ever brought anyone back. So it's the truck bed for them, on nights when it doesn't rain. After that first night, a warm and clammy spell sets in—Poe calls it “armpit weather”--and they get bolder, undressing each other. It's so humid that their bare chests make fart noises when they thrust against each other, so hot that Finn almost—almost—can't stand to have Poe pressed up close to him, after. They drive back with mosquito welts already rising under their resumed clothes, and after Poe drops him off Finn checks himself for ticks under the bright bathroom light.

These are the moments that expand to fill Finn's consciousness and flavor every aspect of his days, even though he has a ton of other shit to do. He's helping Jayda put together a series of back-to-school displays and events, and taking some of Elaine's shifts while she recovers from surgery, and working at the restaurant, and making sure he gets to work early enough to let Mike out of the basement so he can come in again when the library opens officially, and texting with Rey about her motocross training and as much about Poe as she'll put up with. “Christ u got it bad,” she writes. “U know anything abt this guy other than he's a good lay and reads some of the same shit u read?”

Yes. Besides the bad pun thing, Finn knows that Poe has no siblings, that his mother was a pilot, that he eats once a week at a hippie commune in Woodstock where some of his dad's friends and exes live, including the surviving members of a biker gang. He knows that Poe knows the backroads around here like the veins in his hand. Knows he likes to sing and play guitar, but has never heard him. Knows he had a boyfriend named Muran, who died. “Do you mind that I tell you this stuff?” Poe asked once, after he'd been talking for a while into the air with Finn's head on his lap.

“No, I like it,” Finn said. “The reason I don't ask about these things is I don't know what to say when other people ask me about them. But it's not like I don't want to know.”

On their second night, Poe said, looking straight ahead at the road, “I don't want to get in your business, but are you out at work? I don't want to make trouble for you.”

Finn thought about it. “I guess so,” he said. “I'm not _not_ out. It's never come up.”

“I wouldn't say _that,”_ Poe said, predictably—already, that was predictable, and delightful—and reached over. Finn swatted his hand away. “Drive,” he said.

“I'm not gonna, like, grope you in the DVD section,” Poe said. “I just want to know if it's okay to act like we're.” He paused. Finn said, “Together?”

“Yeah. I mean, are we? I mean--”

“Yes,” Finn remembers saying, “yes,” remembers that he really had to restrain himself from doing something that would probably have landed them in the weed-filled ditch by the side of the road.

Pretty soon Poe found a good spot and pulled over—the moon was bright that night, gibbous, and Finn could see the gravel and the clump of oaks beyond it, could see Poe moving closer to him, bright-eyed, a silver knife of light held to one cheekbone, and then his face casting a shadow for them to join each other in.

Moonlight notwithstanding, they mainly know each other by touch, by smell, by sound. Finn has almost never _seen_ Poe's face when he comes, but he's heard Poe's breath grow harsh and choked, smelled the near-bitter sweat and musk of him, felt his cock thicken in hand and mouth the moment before, that moment he loves more than almost any other, when he feels kingly, golden, on the brink of all discoveries.

He finds himself saying things he'd never thought he'd say, things he'd never _thought_ , even. _I want to make you shake. Yeah, you like that? Open your mouth._

He finds himself thinking as if through gauze, underslept and dazed with pleasure, fragile and smeared, completing his tasks—he always completes his tasks—but near-automatically and in waiting for the moment when his shift will end and he'll get to see Poe leaning against the truck and smiling. The moment he loves more than any other is that moment of mutual welcome, when his own smile rises to the surface of his face.

One night, Poe brings them a plastic takeout container of blueberries to share, from one of the farms where he does day labor, “If they need an extra guy for a harvest or a project. It's the best way to get to know people who might want me to interpret for them. Plus I grew up doing it, I know how it goes. And I need the money.” Carpentry and home repair, too, and some painting—more work crews, more conversations. The work, he's said, is physically exhausting and usually extremely boring, and most of those days Poe's too tired to even call in the evening, but that day they ended early. The cool purple taste of the fruit bursts in Finn's mouth. They watch the sky for a while that night before starting to kiss, even though the Perseids are over.

Another night, Poe picks Finn up at the end of his restaurant shift and moves toward him, arms open. “I wouldn't,” Finn says. “I smell like cook grease, I'm disgusting.”

“Let's go swimming,” Poe says. “Can you swim?”

“In the _creek?”_

“No. Gross. No, hop in, I know a good place.”

“Cool,” Finn says. “I _can_ swim, by the way.” It was part of their survival training, along with firestarting and shelter-building and first aid. If the Revelation came in floods, it would be best to be able to swim.

This drive takes them higher than ever before, into the mountains. Finn's day has been so long that he actually dozes off, waking when Poe slows the truck and parks it. He glimpses cabins, hulking and lightless, a complicated and jerry-rigged spigot at the center of a platform. And through the trees, following Poe's gesture, a glint of moon on water. “It's a lake?”

“Sshhh. Yeah, it's a lake.” Though he's speaking in an undertone, Poe sounds as pleased as if he'd dug it out of the earth himself with a turtle shell. “My Tío Lulo bought this campsite when he got out of the Air Force, and for years it did nothing and now all of a sudden he's sitting on a gold mine. There are aging yuppies in some of those cabins, the season's not quite over, so we gotta be quiet. But the water's nice, come on.”

They walk down a limp grass path. The beach is flat and sandy--“Watch out for goose shit--”and the lake water smells a little green, a little stale, as they get closer to it, bumping each other as they walk. “It's kinda shallow and algae-y this season,” Poe says apologetically. “Because of the heat and drought.”

They undress a few feet back from the water line in the sharply-angled moonlight, and Finn is greedy for the glimpses he gets of Poe's body, his shoulders from the back, the dark blur of his bush and the neat muscles in his calves. Poe, for his part, holds Finn at arm's length. “Jesus fuck,” he says, still low. “Fucking look at you. I'm drooling. How do you live with yourself?”

Finn freezes.

Poe steps back from him instantly. “Shit,” he says. “That was wrong, wasn't it. I apologize.” His voice is dull and hollow like someone turned down the sound. Finn knows this isn't Poe's tone, it's his own mind. Knows it will pass, as it has before. Tries to remember what helped him in the past; tries to feel his hands, his lungs, the air on his inner thighs and his neck, the damp compact sand pressing his heels up, keeping him from sinking toward the center of the earth. At last he can be aware again of Poe standing still in front of him, the height and tension of his shoulders making it clear that he's holding himself back from saying more, waiting for Finn to speak first.

When he does, he says, the words sounding heavy to him, “I had to leave the place where I was raised. And the things I did to leave—I do have some trouble living with.” He makes himself add, “I know that's not what you meant,” and stops. The crickets start up again until Finn says, “Could you maybe say something?” and his voice scatters their sounds.

Poe is standing rigid, fists by his sides. He says, “I'm incredibly angry with myself for making you feel bad but I don't want you to have to comfort me for making you feel bad, so.”

Finn doesn't know what to do, either. He's still feeling cold and still, without much comfort to give. But he's not angry. Maybe if they could just move? He says, “You wanna get in the water?” and reaches out, and takes Poe's hand.

They wade in together, the silky mud of the bottom squishing up between Finn's toes and sending chills up his spine, to about thigh-deep. Finn uses their joined hands to pull them close, goosebumps and all. He kisses across Poe's face and down to where his neck and shoulder knit together, first the left side, then the right. “I'll tell you about it,” he says, having come to this conclusion around the time the water reached the backs of his knees. “It's not fair to just wait for you to trip over it.”

Poe breathes out, long and shaky. “Okay. Now?”

“No,” Finn says, “not now,” and goes back to kissing and licking everything he can reach while standing: collarbone and throat-hollow, nipples gathered in the cooling air, solar plexus where a blow can disarm and disorient. When he runs out of reachable skin, he gets to his knees, feels the mud shift to accommodate him. “Finn,” Poe says, voice wavering above him, “we said—I mean, we don't—the condoms are back at the truck.”

“I know. I just want to get you started.” Poe's not hard, not yet, so Finn sinks even lower and kisses and licks at Poe's balls instead. By sort of unhinging his jaw he can get most of Poe's sac in his mouth, and the gulps and sighs floating into the night air above him are extremely gratifying. Wrinkled weight on his tongue, pubes scratching the roof of his mouth: he feels both gagged and tender, unable to do much and yet feeling like what little he's doing is enough.

He mouths delicate flesh and thick hair until his jaw and neck ache, and licks back up Poe's now-hard shaft, bites gently at the sides and tongues around the slit. He can feel the trembling effort in Poe's thighs when he bites one of them, just where the hair thins out and the skin is soft. Poe plucks frantically at Finn's shoulders, and Finn kisses just the underside of Poe's cockhead, where the foreskin's pulled back, before standing again—stiffly, awkwardly, almost slipping in the mud, catching himself—and meeting Poe's mouth with his own.

They kiss deeply for a minute before Finn slides out of Poe's arms, says, “I thought we were swimming,” and sinks down into the water. It's cool and silken, and its thick green muddy scent coats the inside of his nose and mouth. Poe sinks down too and grabs at him; he slides away. The water caresses him, teases him, but he's gotten to like the delay, sometimes, holding off and building up to the urgency of _now._

Finn swims a few strokes, his arms and legs remembering the motions that will carry him forward. He swims a rough circle around Poe, who's cursing and laughing-- “Finn, you little shit, come back here, I swear to God.”

The blasphemy still stings his senses, but it's less now, like a shot far off. “In a second. The water's nice, this was a great idea.”

“Come here and touch me or I'll do it myself.”

Finn swallows hard, the balance between them tipped or pivoted again, skewed more intense. “Yeah,” he says. “I want you to.”

“Yeah?” Poe's crouched in the water, motionless long enough for the ripples around him to die away.

“Stand up,” Finn says. “I want to watch you.”

Poe stands, water streaming from him and catching quicksilver on the moonlit side. “Can you see?” he asks, and something about that question—that he asks it, the way he asks it (so simply, as if he were sitting between Finn and a window)—gets at Finn's heart.

Poe curls his hand around his own cock, hesitates a minute, starts to move—just his hand at first, and then his hips, and then all of him, given over to it. Finn's torn between watching the motions of his whole body and focusing on his face, the parted lips, the grimace, the way he catches the side of his lower lip between his teeth and tosses his head. His hand tightens visibly, long squeezing pulls, then speeds up again, twisting, his breath ringing out across the lake. Finn's lightheaded with wanting him, and after another minute he stands and crosses the space between them and kisses Poe so hard his head bends back, trapping his hand between them.

“Thought you wanted to see me,” Poe says against Finn's lips.

Finn grabs Poe's ass, digs his fingers in, grinds. “Touching's better.”

“No argument here. Let me just--” His fingers slide on Finn's wet belly, gripping their cocks together, picking up the pace again. Finn hangs on, sucks on the side of Poe's neck like that's what's keeping him on earth. They come almost together, Finn with his teeth set in the meat of Poe's shoulder and Poe gasping a moment later.

They duck down again to rinse off. “I wonder if jizz is bad for the pH of the water,” Poe says dreamily.

“What is it anyway?” Finn says, happy to go along with the riff and vaguely remembering a mandatory chemistry course in his first year of college. “Acidic? Basic?”

“Who you calling basic? Speak for yourself, pal.”

Finn splashes in Poe's general direction. Poe comes close again and kisses him and it's like the water, both soaking into him and holding him up.

Sitting in the back of the truck, wrapped together in the sleeping bag and not ready to get dressed yet, Poe's arm around him a little damply still, he tells the story. “I grew up in a place called Sterkill Compound, about half an hour away from here. It was run by the First Order, which is sort of half cult, half militia. They stole kids. I know,” he adds, forestalling out of habit the usual exclamations, “it sounds crazy that that could happen, but it happened to me, and to about forty other kids when I was there. We did firearms training and survival training and drills and loyalty exercises. They were grooming us to be an army.”

“Jesus. Wait, was it? Jesus-y?”

“Kinda. They thought the Book of Revelation was going to come true any minute, and that the dead would rise and that the righteous, which was them, would assume dominion over all the earth. Or they said they thought that. That was one of the things that helped me get out, in a way. Because I could tell that some of them really did believe in an apocalypse that they were trying to bring on as fast as possible, and others of them just liked the power it gave them over people. You know. If there's only one explanation, it might not occur to you that it wasn't the right one. But if there are two explanations, that means there could be more.”

“Still,” Poe says, “pretty fuckin' amazing that you figured it out, and got yourself out of there. You're like Jane Eyre. Or, I don't know, Lauren Olamina.” He frowns against Finn's neck. “Neither one of those is just right.”

Finn doesn't know who that second one is, or what book they're from, or if they're the hero of it. “I hurt people pretty badly when I was escaping,” he says. “One of them was a Warder and I don't care that much about him, honestly. But the other two were guys I trained with. Grew up with. And then.”

This is the part he hasn't told as often, because the first few times he told the story, it hadn't happened yet. “The people who found me after I got out—I still don't know what happened, who did what, but a few weeks later there was a fire. I saw it on the news.” Ms. Soares had recommended he read, or watch-- “just a little, every day”--as a kind of starting point for what to wonder about and where to point his explorations of his new world, and that was how he learned that nearly everything and everyone from the old one was gone.

Poe holds him tightly, silently, for a while.

He'd gone over there on his first weekend free. Elaine had offered him her bike, but he'd never learned to ride, so he walked out through the fields and through the belt of woods where he hid up a tree his first night out and into the enormous empty factory where hundreds of young women had once made bras and girdles—that's what the news story said. He hadn't known it before; the building was just where his life took place. The vines were trying to take it, but so far hadn't made much of a dent in the fire-blackened cinderblock.

He says, “I don't know if they set it themselves. We were an investment, you know, but we were disposable if we started to be a problem. They told us that often enough. Or if it was the guy I talked to, whoever he was. I don't know if he was FBI—I didn't know what the FBI _was—_ and I don't know why I believed him when he said he could help stop them. Now that I know a little more, I wouldn't have thought the FBI would have a problem with it. Some of the Warders—the people who kept order and did the skills trainings—I know they were cops.” The Invigilators were something else again: they lived on site, performed indoctrinations and loyalty checks, wrote and rewrote the rules, punished you if you failed. He tries, fumblingly, to explain this to Poe; considering that it was his whole life for so long, his only doctrine and awareness, he ought to be better at explaining it by now.

“You're shivering,” Poe says. “We should get our stuff back on.”

Finn clutches him tighter around the ribs. “Or not,” Poe adds. “This is good too.” He turns a bit and scrubs his hands up and down Finn's arms. “This is what my mom used to do when I stayed in the water too long and got cold. She said she was rubbing out the goosebumps. I don't know if it actually helps.”

“They didn't keep any records,” Finn says. “I don't know anything about my family. Are they your family if you never see them? None of us did. And if anyone got out, I don't know what happened to them.”

“Is that why you want to be an archivist?”

There isn't a name for it, the feeling that Finn has then: like his claim to something has been recognized, like _he's_ been recognized _._ “That's it,” he says. “I don't want things to be able to disappear when it's convenient for someone. I want other people to be able to know what happened, later, even if it's too late to do anything about it.”

“You're a good person,” Poe says. “You're better than the people who raised you.”

“I don't know. I could be pretty bad and that could still be true.”

“You're _much_ better.” They hold each other in silence for a while after that, until the air feels different and smells different than before: it's getting light. “Oh fuck,” Finn says. “I have to open at 8:30.”

“Yeah. I have to meet with some people, too. You wanna go get breakfast at Michael's?” Michael's is the best 24-hour diner. “I'll buy,” Poe adds. “It's my fault we stayed out all night. If I hadn't been a dumbass thinking I was being cute, none of this would have happened. But I'm glad you told me.” He nuzzles Finn's neck. “Come on. French toast and bottomless coffee. Let's get dressed.”

The next night is Poe's weekly dinner at his dad's friends' commune, and he invites Finn to come along, but Finn says firmly that he needs to sleep. If Poe wanted to fool around and talk about books some more, he would have gone for it and sleep be damned, since that's all he ever wants to do for the rest of his life. But he doesn't think he has it in him to navigate the conversational minefields laid by a bunch of well-meaning strangers. Poe looks a tiny bit stricken and Finn adds, “Another time, I swear, I want to,” and Poe brightens again, even though there's only a week left of Finn's internship, something they've both been assiduously not talking about.

Even though it's closing in on the end of August, it's still beginning-of-August hot and sticky, and Finn's sleep on his air mattress is fitful. He wakes around one in the morning and can't settle again. He's been almost too tired to dream these days, and when he does it's just fragments: a looming face, a sensation of being cornered, a cadence of song. Slip's face, sometimes, fixed in the stern mask they were all trained to wear.

What is Finn doing? Who is he becoming? The last time he felt this unsure, he hurt three people so badly that they probably didn't survive, fled into a world he'd never known and doomed the world he'd come from. But he'd already damned himself by then. Doubt was a sin in the Order, an actual sin, something that could cut you off forever from the new, bright future. Something too that had its own earthly punishments if you spoke it out loud, or even looked skeptical about something an Invigilator said. He had the scars. So did the people he hurt, maybe killed. So did any Soldiers who survived the burning of Sterkill, whether they followed the Order to some kind of regrouping or died in the raid or tried, like him, to make a life.

The deaths of the ones who died are on his head, but he's barely thought about them, any of them, since he and Poe have been together. What does that make him?

Finn never knew what the FN stood for, what the numbers came from. Whether they started with A at some point. If they went through that many kids before they got to him. He'd dug graves, out behind the warehouse, for two Soldiers who died in training, and one who went on a hunger strike. There's no resemblance, none, between that life and the one he has now, with its variety and its uncertainty, its satisfying if somewhat niche purpose and now this incredible, dazzling sweetness.

He gives up on sleep and goes for a run, taking the steep streets, crossing the old bridge one way and the new bridge the other. The light is gray, like the night-turned-dawn they spent in the truck bed going over his story. God, what he'd give to sleep in Poe's arms.

Poe doesn't show up that day. Finn isn't all that worried at first—he's probably working or interpreting, or maybe trying to wrangle his next round of housing because Snap's job, which Finn can't remember, is sending him somewhere that Finn also can't remember. They haven't texted all day either, which is unusual for them. Poe's phone is too old and shitty for a long conversation, but usually he gets a _hey babe_ sometime in the middle of the afternoon, when Poe's taking a water break, or bored in some city office or doctor's waiting room.

He doesn't show up the next day, either. Finn texts twice: _You awake?_ in the morning and _You okay?_ on his lunch break. Nothing. He's distracted, has to ask a couple patrons to repeat themselves when they tell him what they're looking for.

On the way home, in the overhang of the mulberry trees and the stone wall, his phone rings. An Albany area code, a number he doesn't know. “Hello?”

“Finn,” Poe says, and the mix of weariness and strain and relief in his voice hits Finn in the solar plexus. “I'm in jail in Albany.”

Finn barely knows what that means, but he doesn't want to waste time asking stupid questions. “What can I do?” he says.

“Oh God,” Poe says. “Of course you—hang on. Hang on.” Finn can hear him breathing, trying to get himself under control. “Of course that's the first thing you'd say. I don't know what you can do. Your number was in my thumb, you know? They took my phone. Actually I think maybe they broke it. I don't know. I don't know what I thought you could do. I'll figure it out. They already set bail, and I can't afford it, it's two grand, and my dad's out of the country and he doesn't really have it either, and my—there's no one else I can really call.”

Finn feels himself slowing down, getting heavier. He fights it. He thinks, _I am trained for this. I am trained not to panic in a crisis. I am trained to remain calm and wait for orders._

 _But I don't have orders._ “Do you know any lawyers? I can call someone for you.”

“I know one,” Poe says, “but I can't call her.”

“I'll call her. I'll look her up. That's fine.”

“No, I mean, I can't call her for this.” There's a silence, and the vibrations from a voice somewhere in the room Poe's in. “They're saying I have to go.”

“I'm gonna figure it out,” Finn says. “I'm gonna make a plan, okay? I'll let you know as soon as I can. I love you.”

“Finn,” Poe says, and then the connection goes.

Finn leans on the wall, cool stone pressing against his elbows, some little seed or pebble digging in. The mulberries are over and there's just a faint smell of rot. He concentrates on pulling it out of the air, into his lungs through his nose, out through his mouth. He can't stop now. He takes his phone out again and looks up “how to pay bail NY state”. Checks multiple sites until he gets a consistent account that leads back to the New York State penal code, which he also checks. Then his bank balance. Then his contact list, with Rey's number easy to find, right at the top.

They always text, never call, and he's hoping that she'll figure it's an emergency and take it right away if she's not out on the bike. He's right: she picks up on the second ring and says, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, but I need some help. I know you can start some cars without the key, if they're old enough. Could you start a 1982 Toyota pickup truck?”

“ _What?”_

He explains.

After he's done, there's a long, pointed pause. “I want to be sure I have this right,” Rey says finally. “You want me to ride down there, hotwire a stranger's truck _after_ picking the lock, drive the truck _back_ up here so you can get said stranger out of _jail_ with _my_ $200 and _your_ entire savings, and then drive both of you _and_ the bike back to South Jesus Nowhere so you can carry on with your summer fling while I just get on my way?”

“Yes,” Finn says. “That's what I want. Except I also need to stop at the bank, and Poe might want to drive the truck back.” Silence. “Please, Rey.”

More silence. “Okay,” she says. “But you're holding wrenches for me when I get the bike ready for Supercross, no matter how long it takes. And you're doing all my research into modification rules and regs for next year's events and cross-checking it with the state stuff.”

When Rey was growing up, Finn knows, everything had a price. Everything was an exchange. That's all he knows—he doesn't know what the prices were—but she's never once asked him for anything without offering something back.

“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely, I will do that. Thank you, Rey. Can you come tomorrow? Early?”

“And you're coming with me to clean out Han's trailer.”

This time it's his turn to pause. “I would have done that with you anytime you asked.”

“Yeah, well, now you're gonna do it with me on your Thanksgiving break,” she says. “I'll be there by eight, eight-thirty if I hit traffic, so we can get to the bank. Finn, I'm sorry, I have to ask this. Are you sure he's worth it?”

Worth asking his best friend for favor after favor, worth emptying his bank account, worth losing a day of work and maybe his job and his reference with it. Worth straining his other relationships to support this one.

Sure enough to do all of those things. “Yeah, I am,” he says. “I know you're looking out for me. I appreciate it.”

“That appreciation is going to come in the form of a lot of time sifting through state DOT sites and testing sparkplugs,” she warns. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Before he goes to bed, Finn calls the Sunrise Kitchen and leaves a message that he can't come in the next day. If they tell him not to come back at all, oh well; this would've been his second-to-last day anyway. His mind runs ahead of him, imagining questions, anticipating answers. He goes back to the first site he looked at, then reads everything else he can find on the internet about paying bail in New York State, the possibility of hidden costs; he reads it three times. He looks up the Albany County Jail, calls them, double-checks that he can pay cash bail at 9:30 the next morning. He irons his one button-up shirt and hangs it on the back of the door.

 

*

 

“Riding to the rescue,” Poe says, looking up at Finn from the form he's filling out. “I can't believe it. Just like--”

“Poe,” Finn says, embracing him right in front of the desk and the officer on duty and the stapled, highlighted memos on the corkboard, “if you compare me to any fictional character whatsoever, I'll kick your ass.”

Ordinary Poe would take that and run with it. Fresh-out-of-jail Poe holds on hard, his stubble prickling Finn's neck, and Finn's second-guessing starts instantly: maybe a joke was the wrong move? What if-- “Come on,” he says gently. “We're good to go, right?” This to the officer on duty, who says just about, that Poe has to sign one more thing, for his belongings.

They walk toward the exit, Poe swinging the plastic bag with his wallet and belt and phone and car keys in it against his thigh. The only other sound comes from their feet on the linoleum and a landline phone ringing in some locked office.

Rey behaves herself in the parking lot, undoing her operation on the engine so that the key will work—Poe shows a gleam of interest—and graciously accepting Finn's help unloading her bike. “Wrenches,” she reminds Finn, and shoots Poe a narrow-eyed glare before buckling on her helmet and roaring away. And then it's just the two of them, standing next to the driver's-side door.

“Are you okay to drive?” Finn says.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “I can always drive.” When he turns the wheel for a hard left, he winces a little. “Handcuffs,” he says. One side of his face is looking puffy, too, and there's a cut on his temple that his hair was hiding.

“Do you want to tell me what happened? You can, but you don't have to.”

“No, I'll tell you. You told me.” They clear the city limits on I-87 and pick up speed. “I was with Hector and Junior, two of the guys I interpret for, they had to go to Albany to talk to a guy who can maybe help them out with immigration stuff, and I can't fit two guys in the truck without risking getting pulled over so we took the bus. So then the cops show up while we're waiting for the bus back. Of course. So they ask what we're doing, and we don't say anything to them, and they ask for ID, and things just kind of escalated from there. My charges are obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty and resisting arrest, if you're interested. But they took Hector and Junior into ICE custody.”

“Shit,” Finn says. He doesn't know anything about this, any of it. Poe's talked about it a little, a few bitter phrases here thrown into his accounts of his day, the occasional life story of one of the people he knows through translating. I should have looked into it more, Finn thinks. Why didn't I?

Poe drives well, even exhausted and injured; they slide through traffic like a drop down a windowpane. When they near the 9W exit he says, “I don't actually know where we're going. I can't go back to Snap's like this, he's trying to get out the door by tomorrow and this'll throw him into Papa-Bear mode.” 

“Come to my place,” Finn says. “You can take a shower, lie down if you want.”

“You sure?”

“All I have is an air mattress, but yeah.”

“You said you loved me,” Poe says. “On the phone.”

“I do love you.” Finn had almost forgotten he said that, but fortunately it's something he doesn't have to think much about. It's just true.

They pull up in front of the apartment complex. It's the middle of the working day, and the A/C's off, the house airless and quiet. Finn puts on the box fan and the ceiling fan. “Shower's here,” he says, showing Poe how to turn it on. He puts a clean—well, cleanish—dishtowel on the kitchen counter. “There's icepacks in the freezer for your wrists.” The icepacks are Aham's, for workout injuries, but he won't be home for hours. “This is my room and you can rest as long as you need. Is it, um. Is it okay to leave you to it?”

“Yeah, I'm of sound mind and body,” Poe says, with an edge to it, and then immediately, “Sorry. Yeah, this is good. But where are you going?”

“Get us some food.” The fridge situation is, as usual, pretty bleak: Aham's protein powder, Tyler's beer, milk for cereal they don't currently have, a cucumber for some reason.

“I'm not super hungry,” Poe says. “I think lying down is a good idea.”

“We can heat it up later,” Finn says. “Oh, my towel's on the back of my door and it should be pretty dry from this morning.” He turns to go, and Poe reaches out for him with surprising speed. “Give me a kiss,” he says. “Jesus, I love you so much.”

Worry and joy and a sense of inadequacy all tear at Finn on his way out the door, made further distracting by exhaustion, and he's two-thirds of the way to the Sunrise Kitchen before he realizes where his feet have taken him. He meant to go to the little grocery, but it's probably just as well; he can't cook, and he doesn't know if Poe can, and anyway it wouldn't be fair to ask him to right now.

“Thought you couldn't come in today, man, why you here?” As usual, Dennis looks and sounds like he doesn't give a damn one way or the other.

Finn is a bad liar at the best of times and he's too tired right now to tell anything but the truth. “My boyfriend just got out of jail,” he says. “I don't have any food around and he needs something to eat.”

Dennis's face remains unreadable, but his hands spring into action, opening styrafoam clamshells, hovering over the serving spoons. “What you wanna bring him, roti? Oxtail? Oxtail's good to put your strength back up.”

“Doubles and a side of oxtail,” Finn says. “Please.”

Dennis puts the order together and throws a couple of patties on top, bulges the whole thing into a plastic bag. When Finn gets his wallet out, Dennis stares over Finn's shoulder at the door and says distantly, “I can't see that money, man.”

“You sure? Shit, Dennis. Thanks.” Thanks for seeing me, he means, letting me see you, thanks for being a person who knows that I'm a person too, and that Poe is a person, and that it's right for all of us to be alive and need each other. Thanks for doing what you can, given what you know.

That's a lot to get from a couple boxes of food, but he's pretty sure it's right.

“No problem,” Dennis says. “See you tomorrow.”

When he gets back with the food, Poe's asleep on the air mattress in t-shirt and underpants, on top of the blanket, the icepacks shoved to one side and the towel they're wrapped in wet with condensation. His hair is damp and he's half-curled on his side, lips parted. Finn watches him, counts the breaths like he counts his own when he's trying to calm himself. He takes off his shoes and lies down at Poe's side, trying not to bubble the mattress too much. “Stay,” he whispers, even though it doesn't make sense: he's the one who's leaving. Two more days. “Stay.”

He dozes off himself—reaction, probably. He wakes because Poe is starting to stir, looking at Finn first with a dazed, transparent tenderness, then a slow and obvious seeping of awareness that makes him bury his face in his hands. “I hate that,” he says, muffled.

“When you forget for a minute and then you remember? I hate that too.”

“Right,” Poe says. “Right.”

“Can I put my arms around you or would that be bad?”

“It'd be good.” Poe inches sideways and closer, and lifts his head for Finn to put one arm underneath. Finn presses his face into Poe's curls—they're dry now in the breeze from the fan and they make his nose itch. He wants to make out but he also wants to let Poe call it, and is relieved if not surprised when Poe wriggles and rotates and kisses him.

It's a gentle kiss, but turns quickly. The tendons in Poe's neck are rigid under Finn's stroking fingers. “I wanna suck you off,” Poe mutters, his breath warm against the side of Finn's head. “Can I do that for you?”

The phrasing's a little weird, but not enough to make Finn say no. “Please,” he says instead, and Poe sighs, kisses the apple of Finn's throat, plucks at the buttons of his shirt until Finn covers Poe's hand with his own, looks into his face, tries to understand what it is he's seeing there. “It's okay,” he says. “I got it.” He undoes all the stupid buttons, sits up, peels the shirt off and loses the undershirt. “You too, yeah?”

Poe struggles out of his t-shirt—his coordination still seems off, so Finn helps him, and kisses his neck. He's increasingly worried that Poe isn't actually up for this, but Poe is kissing him now with enthusiasm, or possibly determination, leaning into Finn like he's molding their bodies together. “How do you want me?” he asks.

“Just like that.”

“You sure, man?” He's still half-sitting up, back to the wall, with Poe between his spread knees. “That's gonna give you a weird angle.”

“Yeah, because I wanna finger you too. The works. Deluxe edition.”

“That sounds _good,_ ” Finn says, and Poe grins, enough like his ordinary grin that Finn feels okay to proceed. He's half-hard when Poe takes him in, and feeling himself getting the rest of the way hard in Poe's mouth is one of the hottest things that's ever happened to him. Poe pulls off to get a condom, rolls it down with his mouth and then stays, gulping and humming, for a few minutes before pulling off to offer Finn two fingers to lick and spit on, pressing down on his tongue so that Finn sucks like he's the one giving head. “What do you think,” Poe murmurs, “you want me to make it last, or you wanna come for me right now?”

He wants Poe's mouth back on him as soon as possible. “Now,” he says, and Poe gives a decisive nod and dives back down, sucking and swallowing, spit everywhere, tongue flicking and then the slick surround of his throat. Finn heaves up, cries out sharply, and subsides, hot to the core and his thighs still shaking.

Poe ties off the condom and puts it somewhere, Finn can't see where, hopefully not where they'll both forget about it. He settles back at Finn's side and kisses just to the left of his navel. “At least I'm good for something,” he says.

“Whoa,” Finn says. “Hey.”

“Sorry,” Poe says, and flops down, opening an inch or two of space between them. “That was a piece of inner monologue that got out. You weren't supposed to hear that.”

Finn is so tired, and his nerves are still firing and sparking, and Poe's eyes look like bruises. “Okay, but I did hear it. But I don't know what it means.”

“It doesn't matter. Just forget it.”

“Don't,” Finn says. “Please don't do that. Don't act like I just want you around for what you do for me. And don't make me like—a servant of some idea you're having about yourself. Or if you're gonna do it, at least tell me what the idea is. I've had enough of that.” The minute the last sentence is out, he wishes it was back in again. It isn't fair for him to drag his past into this fight—it's too looming, too much of an escalation, and he says so.

“Fuck,” Poe says, rolling over—part of Finn's brain still notes the dip of muscle over the swell of his ass, and wants to kiss him there—and pounding his fist on the air mattress, which makes a dull smacking sound. “No, you're right, you're totally right, of course it matters. I'm sorry. I just...” He presses his face down, lifts it again at an angle that can't be comfortable for his neck. “I was supposd to make the difference for them,” he says. “I've got skills, I've got resources. And in the end it didn't help. I might even have made it worse.”

“You can't know that, though.” Finn reaches over and strokes his back. Poe accepts the touch, but his shoulders stay rigid, locked in. “I left them,” he says. “They were the ones who needed the out, but when you gave it to me I took it.”

“Poe, sometimes you have to leave people behind.” Finn swallows. He's saying this to himself, he realizes. “Sometimes it's you or no one. Would the bail thing even have worked for them, if it was Immigration?” God, he hates being ignorant. “Sometimes there's no way to make it right. Sometimes you can't win.”

“I don't want that,” Poe says. “That feels like giving up.”

“Maybe there's something else you could do. People you could work with, to help them. I'll help you look. I'm a good researcher.”

“There are,” Poe says. “I know about them, I just--” He makes a helpless sound and drops his head again. Finn keeps stroking his back, adding a little pressure, squeezing the back of his neck and scratching into his hair. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's only comforted someone once before—Rey, when Han died—and that was different: she wasn't blaming herself for it, partly because it was obviously not her fault.

That gives him an idea. “Maybe try blaming the people who actually did something wrong here, before you blame yourself,” he says. “The cops and the immigration people. Get mad at them and then see if there's anything left over.” This is something the therapist at SUNY Albany's counseling services recommended to him, when he started seeing her for the nightmares. It didn't work that well for him, but that doesn't mean it's bad advice.

Poe's twisting the sheets, fussing with the mattress valve. “But I'm the only one I can make do or not do things. If I don't blame me, who will?”

Finn gets a hand under Poe's chin and turns his face gently. Poe's expression is rueful, self-aware, which is an improvement on how he looked and sounded before. “It won't be me,” Finn says. “Unless it's something you actually did wrong.” He kisses Poe's forehead, leaves his lips there, breathing in the smell of his own drugstore-brand soap transformed by Poe's skin into something new and exciting.

Poe shakes his head. “Every time,” he says. “Every time, you say the most _you_ thing that you could possibly say.”

“I'm not sure what it is I'm doing.”

“Trust me, it's great.”

He does trust Poe, that's true. And he's happy to be the person he is at the moment, with this other person. He moves down, kisses Poe's eyelids and the corner of his mouth. Kisses him properly, deliberately at first, then feeling the kiss slide, or _climb,_ into something both hungrier and more free.

“I didn't get to finger you before,” Poe says against his mouth, “you still want me to?”

“If I get to make you come, too, then yeah.”

They kiss more, spit and sweat, sliding against each other. Finn grunts as Poe's fingers wind into him and through him, sighs as Poe kisses his chest and belly. “Slow,” he says, “slow.” He closes his eyes to feel it, opens them again to see Poe watching him with awe, with wonder.

They catch each other looking, and Poe grins. Finn grins back, or starts to, then loses control of his face, his limbs, his nerves entirely as Poe twists his fingers again and rubs Finn's dick with the other hand. “God,” he says, and he never believed, but saying it _feels_ extreme. “Poe, I want you to fuck me, I want--”

Poe stills, just briefly. “I want to, too,” he says. “Also. But you've never done it before, right?” Finn shakes his head; they've talked about it, in a calm matter-of-fact way in the back of the truck between mosquito bites.

Poe's hand is moving again on Finn's cock, but sort of automatically, like he's thinking. “I'm kinda out of energy,” he says. “I don't think I can make it good for you right now. And I want it to be so good for you.” Now his other hand's moving again, stretching, spreading; now he's craning his neck to kiss Finn on the mouth. “I promise I'll make it so good. I'll start just like this, finger your hole nice and open, and then I'll push into you, slow--” he stops moving again, but this time it's full of intent, potential, and Finn groans, hips driving down onto Poe's hand. “Like that,” Poe's saying in his ear, “show me you want it. I can't wait, I'll get to feel my balls brushing up against your ass, how tight you are, I'll fuck you like this, on your back, so I can see your beautiful face, and you'll feel so good around me. You feel so good, Finn. But I'll hang on and I'll fuck you till you come for me—come on, babe, let me see you, let me feel you--”

He returns to himself when Poe eases his fingers out and leans over to kiss Finn's cheek, then sits back, a gloss of sweat on his forehead and his cock standing out from his body. Finn says weakly, “I thought you were out of energy.”

“Oh,” Poe says, “I can always talk, too.”

Finn struggles up on his elbows and says, “Lie down next to me.”

He takes a turn to watch Poe for a second without touching him, enjoying the sight of him in the light filtered through the curtain: his flushed chest with its scatter of hair, the contrast between his brown-gold forearms and his paler shoulders, the stubble on the apple of his throat, the place where his belly folds just slightly into the top of his thigh. Finn rolls over and sort of squirms down, the air mattress bulging and dipping, to kiss that spot, then takes Poe's cock all the way to the back of his throat, briefly, just to get him wet with spit.

Poe gasps and says his name. Keeps saying it as Finn moves up again and gets a good rhythm going with his hand, says it muffled against Finn's mouth as they kiss and kiss, says it clearly and sharply, “ _Finn,”_ when he arches up and comes.

Finn kisses the corner of Poe's panting mouth and lies down again. The room reeks: the recent sweat of exertion and the old stress-sweat and the secret sweat of ass and groin. Finn wishes he could lick them both clean. Could transport them to the lake again, where they could splash and float and drift.

It's evening. It's early evening, that thick gold light slanting through the window, and he got his wish. Poe is spooned up to him, arm across his ribs, breathing steadily into the back of his neck.

It's evening—later now, dark in the room—and Poe is sitting up, frowning at his phone. Finn reaches over to touch him, and the frown transforms in the screen's weak glow. “Hey, sleepy.”

“Hey.”

“I just got a problem solved for me,” Poe says. “Lulo wants me to close up the campsite for him for the winter, so I can stay up there until it gets too cold, starting whenever.” He frowns again. “I wonder if my dad pulled some strings on this one. I feel like I'm maybe getting family-ed at.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Finn is genuinely curious. He doesn't know anyone with a family, as such. Rey never knew hers, either. Han—whom he didn't know very well anyway—was estranged from his. Dr. Kanata has no pictures in her office and never mentions relatives, and he wouldn't dare ask.

“No, it's not bad, it's just—pride. You've never asked me why I don't have a job and a place to live like a normal person.”

“I figure you'd tell me if you wanted me to know,” Finn says. “I don't care about being a normal person. I guess it would be cool to know if you can go to the doctor if somebody hurts you again.”

“Yeah, I have whatsis. New York State of Health, which I still can't believe they called it. It knocks me out every month, but I have it.”

“Okay, good. Me too.”

“Oh my God,” Poe says, a note of dawning horror in his voice that wakes Finn the rest of the way up. “The money. Fuck, the money. Finn! Where did that bail money come from?”

“Work and my stipend. Mostly. Rey kicked in $200. I was lucky I had most of it, a bond agency would've wanted collateral.” He'd found that out in his late-night research, had entertained wild visions of asking Rey to put up the bike, of promising to work for them, even. He still feels a little sick thinking about it.

“You had _most_ of it. How much do you have now?”

“Poe, it's fine. I already paid my sublet here, I don't pay rent in Albany, I have my last check coming from Sunrise, and once the semester starts my workstudy will kick in again. As long as nothing major goes wrong, I'll be fine.” He isn't really this sanguine. Major things do go wrong. But he's lived through them before, or so he tells himself. He hopes his teeth stay okay, that's the main thing.

“Tell me you did that math before you emptied your fucking savings for me.” Of course he didn't, and he can see, even in the dark, that Poe knows it. “Finn, how can I--”

“Shh,” Finn says. He gets enough of this transactional bullshit from Rey; he _can't_ have it here. “Can we just, like, agree that I know you don't love me just because I took care of you, and you know I don't love you just because you suck dick like there's no tomorrow.”

“Hey--”

“I said _just_ because.”

“Oh, okay then.”

“Besides,” Finn says, and his heart is beating hard again—he can feel it in his stomach and his lips. “It'll even out. Over time. If we keep going.”

“My court date is in November, up that way,” Poe says. “Can I--”

“Come see me,” Finn says, “please. Before then. As soon as you can.”

He does a little reconnaissance to make sure Tyler and Aham aren't up playing MarioKart or Animal Crossing. The house is quiet and dark. They rinse off in lukewarm water and heat up the food all together in Tyler's mac and cheese pot, the apartment's one cooking utensil. They eat it standing in the kitchen in t-shirts and underwear, whispering—mostly for the drama of it—about Rey's bike, and about trying to figure out the bail thing, and a little bit, as they're wiping their mouths with paper towels, about what they're going to do next. “I don't want to do what you do,” Finn says at one point, delirious with afterglow and good flavors and food coma and the need for more sleep, “but I want to do what I do how you do it. Generous, like that.”

Poe makes a dismissive noise, and Finn pushes him up against the counter—the kitchen is narrow, there's not far to go—and kisses him, and then just holds onto him as tightly as he can. Tomorrow Finn will do his last shift at the library, and his last shift at Sunrise Kitchen, and sleep on the air mattress. The following morning, he'll let the air out of it and roll it up and get on the bus.

 

*

 

 

Finn finished the online quiz forty-five minutes ago. He's made himself two cups of tea and let them both sit till they got lukewarm. It's mid-October, and he's sitting on the bed in the apartment above Dr. Kanata's garage with his window open, the damp too-warm air coming in, and his reading for tomorrow—an article about racism in Library of Congress classification—open in another tab that he's not looking at. It's 9:43.

The day Poe was supposed to come up for his first visit, second week in September, he called to say the truck had broken down. It took another two weeks for him to order the part and fix the engine, and then it was time to close up the campsite, which turned out to be a more than full-time job: carpentry and plumbing and debris removal and even some forestry, supervising the taking down of an infested tree and ripping up poison ivy.

Meanwhile Finn has been occupied too: with work, with homework, with repaying his debt to Rey. He and Poe have been talking late at night, sometimes falling asleep to the sound of each other's voices.They've tried sexting a couple times, but Poe's phone isn't really up to it, and phone sex made them both shy: it's different when you can't see the other person's face, smell his skin, feel his hands.

So Finn says what he's learning, and Poe says things like, “Cross your fingers, but I think Eulalia and Salvador are actually going to be able to stay in their apartment,” and “I'm rereading Melville and reading Miéville at the same time. Mostly 'cause I thought it would be funny--” _Funny to who?_ Finn doesn't ask, partly because he knows the answer-- “but it's actually kind of great.” Finn goes to the city library and takes out the books Poe names. Sometimes he tries to start one when he's done with his homework, and sometimes he just sits with his hand on the scuffed plastic of the protective jacket.

He's held all the wrenches that Rey needed holding, and she and the bike are off to Las Vegas. Hopefully she'll return triumphant and that will give her the strength to face cleaning out Han's trailer. He's gone and gotten an STI test, and written two mock funding proposals and a real one, and made back about a third of the money he spent on bail. Dr. Kanata got fall funding to pay him for work on the archive, and she's pleased with him. “Happiness makes you smarter,” she said.

He's proud of this thing, or that thing, he's done or is doing, but he's having trouble making it add up, and when he imagines Poe's face or voice he's started second-guessing himself again. When they're talking, even with the staticky echo and frequent dropped calls, it's better: he's surprised by how much he has to say, and how as he says it, a coherent picture of himself begins to emerge: what he did, how he felt, who he is. Lets him lean back and hear Poe talk about the faucet he fixed or the garbage that leaked all over the back of the truck, imitating his dad's tattoo-artist and biker-turned-baker friends or relating the unnerving slowness which which the leaves are turning.

Poe was supposed to get here “around 9”, to stay with Finn for three whole unbelievable days. It's 9:47. Finn sips at his cup, makes a face, picks up his phone in case he somehow missed the notification. He's nervous, a heavy flopping feeling where his ribs meet. Even though they haven't been out of touch for more than two nights since the end of August, even though he knows more about Poe now and maybe even a little more about himself, who will they be when they see each other?

At 9:51, the phone goes. _Downstairs,_ the screen says, and that's where Finn goes, at a run. He hopes Poe can hear his feet thudding. He has nothing to hide, everything to give away.

He feels Poe almost before he sees him, hurtling into his arms, solid and damp, smelling like wet wool and hair oil and his own particular smell. They cling to one another, and when they step apart, Finn's eyes are damp too. “Nice sweater,” he says.

“My dad made it.”

“You guys are talking? Come upstairs, c'mon.”

“Yeah, we're talking,” Poe says, following him: Finn can tell exactly how far apart they are, two steps, and that Poe has to slow his pace to keep from gaining. “We weren't exactly not talking, but. He told me I should get a lawyer.”

“I told you that too.”

“Yeah, well, great minds.” They're in the apartment now, standing on the camel-colored'70s carpet, facing each other. A blink of shyness and doubt, and then it's gone, like that, banished by the reality of Poe's presence, the mist spangling his sweater, the lines—just traces—around his eyes. “I want you to meet him,” Poe says. “And the rest of the old farts. Only if you want though.”

“Yeah? Okay.” His ideas about “meeting the parents” come mostly from TV reruns that he watched for what Rey calls "human research", but he knows Poe's dad is important to him and that this is a good thing. Probably.

“I did call her—the lawyer, I mean, the one I know. And she put me in touch with some more people who could help with Hector and Junior's case, too, and another thing that's come up since you've been away, I'll tell you about it.”

Finn can't believe that Poe was ever anything less than vivid in his consciousness, that his sense of Poe was ever less than sharp and clear, complete and whole, more real than anyone else Finn knows. Poe seems to sense him looking: he starts to strike a pose, abandons it, and just stands very still, as if he's waiting for Finn to come back to him. And Finn does: two steps and they're in each other's arms again. Finn gets his hands up underneath the sweater, under Poe's shirt, feeling the skin between his ribs and hips, spreading his fingers wide to take in as much as he can. “Bed's over here,” he says, tugging Poe along with him. “If you want.”

“I want,” Poe says.

A long time later, naked and draped in streetlight and shadow, Poe says, “Tell me what you did today. Give me the whole picture.”

“It's just the same stuff.”

“Yeah, but now I get to see you while you tell it. Feel you. It's much better.”

So Finn talks about metadata and classification and making sandwiches for other students, rude and polite, and his research with Dr. Kanata, and the dog he saw when he was out for a run, and he feels the record of his day, his being, assemble and take shape. Poe's up on an elbow, listening to him, making interested faces. He mostly keeps his hands to himself, but when Finn talks about turning over yet another page of a slave ship manifest and feeling despair suffuse his entire body, Poe reaches over and presses the back of his hand to Finn's bare chest: not a caress, but the ground for a charge.

Finn meets him palm to palm, and feels the place where their hands touch, muscle and sweat, skin and infinitely small space, as the pivot where they can part from each other and return again.

 

 


End file.
